It is with great pleasure that Simone Subal Gallery announces the opening of B. Ingrid Olson’s double-ended arrow on Sunday, January 11, 2015. This is Olson’s first solo show at the gallery. The exhibition runs until February 22nd. Please join us for an opening reception on January 11 from 6 – 8 pm.
double-ended arrow features photographic wall-based works, cement relief sculptures, and freestanding steel and ceramic sculptures. Across a variety of materials, Olson alternately demonstrates and complicates an internalized, studied understanding of perception. In particular, she manipulates the optical hierarchy of proximate vision, the shift between a central focal point and the blurring of the peripheral.
Olson approaches photography as a medium for thinking. Within her quick, gestural photographs, she positions her body as a vehicle for the first-person perspective suggested by the camera’s lens. Looking directly upon herself or through the assistance of mirrors, Olson contorts her body into the picture plane, often against a backdrop of studio detritus and collaged printed matter. In the final photographic constructions, one always recognizes the physicality of the printed images, which further complicates the perspective and focus. Olson treats the photograph as both object and illusion whether she prints an image directly onto a matboard—thus becoming a bracket for another picture—or assembles images within the boundary of a Plexiglas box.
The wall-reliefs and freestanding sculptures are similar in concern to the photographic works and allude to problems of perception and the structural mechanisms of vision. The reliefs are a series of casts taken from a small wooden object. Viewed from the front, the object appears to be two lines converging in a rectangular field, similar to the crosshairs of a viewfinder. When seen from other perspectives, the form gives way to two concave verticals that curve into the surface, encompassing the face of the relief, dipping in from edge to center and back again. These dark, absorbent structures offer pauses within the continuum of vision and mirrored reflections seen in the rest of the exhibition. In the totemic floor sculptures, Olson situates roughly hewn, hand built ceramic forms of generalized human features upon two tiered steel stands. The stacked sculptures show a fragmented figure looking upwards at itself. The constitutive elements suggest a stuttering representation and a makeshift studio aggregate.
B. Ingrid Olson was born in 1987 in Denver, Colorado. She currently lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. Recent solo exhibitions include: The vases my monitors their frames (cura.basement, Rome, 2014) and From her come a gang and a run (Document, Chicago, 2014). Select group exhibitions include The Independent: Dreams that Money Can’t Buy (MAXXI Museo, Rome, 2014) and We seem to still be moving (Simone Subal Gallery, 2013).
